Kenya’s Copyright Tribunal has ruled that works generated by artificial intelligence cannot attract copyright protection or be registered as original creations, delivering a landmark clarification on AI authorship under the country’s copyright law.

The ruling comes from a dispute involving Cynthia Beldina Akoth, author of Bible Scripture Stories, who had used AI tools to help produce content under contract for the Aryeh Movement. When the working relationship broke down, Beldina discovered that Aryeh had registered the literary works with the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO) under Aryeh’s own name rather than hers.

Beldina filed a complaint with KECOBO seeking revocation of Aryeh’s certificate of registration, arguing she had never consented to the registration and had not transferred ownership of the works. KECOBO agreed and stripped Aryeh of its certificate. Aryeh then escalated the matter to the Copyright Tribunal.

Although the case centred on a registration dispute, the Tribunal used it to address a question Kenya’s Copyright Act has never explicitly settled: whether AI can be considered an author.

The Tribunal held that authorship under Kenyan law remains exclusively human. It noted that the Copyright Act defines an author as the person who first creates a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work. While AI can produce content, and creators are free to use it, the Tribunal found that AI lacks the legal personality required to qualify as an author and that originality, creativity, and intellectual effort, the foundations of copyright, cannot be attributed to a machine.

“There has to be an element of sufficient human intervention to determine the extent of copyrightability of works generated by AI,” the tribunal stated, adding that AI-assisted…